Gyula Illyés

Variations a la France

(excerpts)

 

Around the middle of the vast glass concourse there has been constructed a small, windowless and roofless box - shaped room. The Customs Man guides me over to this. My glance involuntarily strays to his chin. Could he be leading me over there for me to shave him? That, though, was just an initial stray thought. Reminiscences attract one another by their hue and not their weight, by their surfaces and not their content. I have passed before now between rows of uniforms in a prison corridor, musing as I made my way on whether a firing squad might not be awaiting me at the end of the walk. A fresh psychological mystery: at this I regain my composure all at once. We step into the tiny house built within the enormous hangar. My attendant turns to face me.
"Turn out everything from your pockets onto that table there."
I take everything out, meanwhile being dumbfounded myself by the variety of the mass of things that I have on me. Yet again there is a crumb of comfort for me. That pea - sized eraser has also been found: it was lurking at the bottom of the breast - pocket of my jacket. And L.'s address in Rome that I was hunting for so hard, likewise found, albeit too late and now of no use (I have just come from Rome). There is something obscene about the Customs Man's watching my every movement. There are two of us in the room. He has closed the door and turned the key. A mind eager to learn will find pabulum anywhere. I am astonished to register that from this moment on I know exactly the psychological state a seventeen - year - old maiden must be in on being dragged into the fo'c'sle. That almost makes me smile. Even involuntarily, I gain reassurance from the fact that I am a good deal taller in build than my host. He motions, face set, that I should undo my tie and lay that too on the table.
L.N. [László Németh] is right: there is a certain point beyond which there is just one defence against human vileness and debasement, and that is to switch your role as victim into that of observer. I do not condemn the Customs Man, and he is thereby merely diminished in my eyes. For one thing, he is a mere part of the machinery, however zealously he scurries around.
And don't think I am going to identify you with your homeland either, I muse.
He steps up to me and checks that I have not been deceiving him; that is to say, he too hunts through my pockets one by one. I calmly tolerate this spit - in - the - face at my honesty. "Don't think I shall be placing you on the level of Charles Baudelaire either," I muse. He probes the seams of my jacket, frisks both my arms between his palms then proceeds to do the same with my thighs, my knees, and my legs. He fingers round the turn - ups of my trousers, then, as if on a sudden inspiration, fingers them once again. No Napoleonic crown and sceptre trundle out of there either. I have to turn round. Now he lovingly caresses my back, lingering to fondle the coat collar and the shoulder pads. Meanwhile, a spark of life flickers inside him. He makes a statement.
"You are Hungarian."
I corroborate the statement.
"Americans, Turks and Hungarians all cheat at customs."
I stand there in silence, as if I were one in an endless row of sons of these three nations. I cannot help wondering what sort of Americans, what sort of Turks and what sort of Hungarians I was falling into line with, who might have been my predecessors here.
"Be seated. Take your shoes off."
But as though there was something more he wished to say. He stares lengthily, engrossed, first at one of my feet then at the other, as if standing before a tough choice. Finally, with the assurance of a water diviner, he points a finger at my left shoe.
"That one."
I hand over the hefty item of footwear, double soled for my peregrinations. He inspects it with the thoroughness of a man whose entire life has hinged on the secrets of bootmaking, or one who has never seen a shoe before. He eventually hands it back. The shoe is placed toe - first in my hand, and as I involuntarily grasp it the thought passes through my mind - obviously from the world of the palm's personal memory - whether it was not my duty as a man to bash the Customs Man on the nose with the footwear now sitting in my hand like a bludgeon, to smash his head to smithereens then chop up the room, and after that the vast concourse built over it, the firmament into tiny pieces. One has to make a start somewhere in defending freedom and the dignity of man. I soon concede, though, that this would be to stray down an improper path.
"Do you not wish to see the other one?" I enquire, now recalling that I am a Christian after all.
The other one he rejects, incomprehensibly and almost offensively ignoring it. He makes do with one cheek. On the other hand, he now fondles my stockinged ankles and soles with the same maternal affection as before. Whilst he is caressing my feet with such solicitude, even fingering the toes individually, I conjecture what would happen if he were now to ask me to open my mouth and he wished to poke a finger into my throat, or my ears, or some other bodily cavity. If he were to request me to stretch out on the table because he wished to open up my belly with that huge pair of scissors hanging over there on the wall? I do not know where the limits of his powers lie, and so the borderlines of my own power, my individuality, are also hazy. For a minute I have the sensation I do not even exist. I have the sensation, whilst I offer my foot, that I am just a concept, a mere symbol. And equally symbolic is our association, our strange relationship. I am aware of the power of symbols. Do I not have a duty to kick him in the face, at least for the sake of the symbolism? In the face, the mug, the head, so that the head should fly off the neck, smash through the wall of the room, the concourse, the firmament, and land up in space as some baleful moon in an alien solar system. Yet he too is just a fragment of a symbol. The path to the essence - to this obvious lunacy of the world, to the overcoming of this madness - does not lie through him.
He now stands back a little, inspecting me from a few paces back in much the way painters do when, having fiddled with some detail, they take a squint through half - closed eyes to gain an impression of the whole picture. This is an opportunity for me to inspect him in like fashion, with creative intent. An idea flashes into my head, and again a psychological insight. "I have you in my grasp after all," I consider, "You are already in it!" Many people identify inspiration with mental revenge. That explanation is overhasty. Readers of my work in progress will verify that at the moment of inspiration my soul was free of all ignoble passions. I was merely viewing my subject. We looked at one another, therefore, in the reciprocity of the pike caught by a fox and the fox caught by the pike. He too is searching for the essence. The difference is, he is not satisfied.
He steps over to the table, in a movement now reminiscent of painters when picking and choosing amongst their tubes. His expression is care - laden; he is rummaging amongst my papers. Has he spotted the missing tint? He lifts up a page torn from a pocket book - the very one on which the pencil scribble has become most notably effaced - and raises it to his eyes. He beckons me over.
"What does it say here?"
I wouldn't mind knowing either, I can tell you.
"Notes of some sort," I say.
"Read it out. But I should warn you that I have the means to get it checked."
"It's written in a foreign language, in Hungarian."
"I can have that checked too. Just translate."
I would like to ask whether I should translate it in rhyme. After some difficulty I manage to make out from the scrawl:

No village is so small that you would not find
the girl tailor - made for your approval...

As yet, I had not translated a single one of my works into a foreign language. Partly out of modesty, but also through appreciation of the task. It calls for a special ability. I am petrified to think of the daredevil audacity with which I formerly made bold to express myself in a foreign language, by the page, at the drop of a hat. Nowadays, I would have neither the guts nor the heart to bring myself to do that. But in this tight spot I nevertheless resume and, clearing my throat, carry on translating the text with slavish literalness, sacrilegiously trampling on rhyme and rhythm:

No village is so small that you would not find
the girl tailor - made for your approval...
the staunch friend, the inveterate rival,
a heavenly ocean of youthful designs...

"What does that mean?"
"I'm going to clobber you after all," I think to myself. "The job has to begin somewhere. I'll swing a right hook to the mush, then a left, then let go an uppercut to that stupid chin so hard you take off the roof of this room, this concourse, and go flying...," I interrupt the salutary fantasy; I realise I have been here already. With smiling equanimity - after all, can there be any bigger insult than to be asked the meaning of one's own poems? - I respond, "It's a poem."
He peers at me. It is starting to occur to him too in a dim sort of way that we are not made for one another. In his case, though, this still goads him to regrettable obstinacy. He has already expended no small effort on me.
"Americans, Turks and Hungarians are all cheats".
That brooks no protest, not even that I, possibly alone in the rather considerable collective totality of Americans, Turks and Hungarians, have patently not cheated. Both of us, therefore, stick to our guns. I am obviously an exception that proves the rule. Or else I am cheating precisely by not cheating; that is to say, I am the cleverest of all cheats.
He gestures that I may pick up my stuff. As I do this, he again scrutinises me with the look of painters stepping away from their work. Might there be something about me that could be touched up after all? He shakes his head. He is sad and struggling with doubts, maybe even self - reproaches. What can he have overlooked? I know how hard it is to reach the point where we doubt in our own abilities. He watches dejectedly.
"Why are you travelling to Paris?"
"I am going to steal the Eiffel Tower. At midnight I shall dig a huge ditch at Charenton and divert the Seine round Paris straight to Saint - Cloud, which is a shorter path anyway, by the way. Before that, though, I'll hitch a ball of twine to the Île Saint - Louis, the Île de la Cité whilst I am at it, and drag them out to sea, then tow them over the sea, up the Danube, along the Sió, the Kapos and the Koppány as far as Tolnatamási, and you can look for them there." I thought all this out in detail only later on, in the esprit de l'escalier at the time it just flashed across my mind. What I said instead was:
"I would like to see what has happened to the French. I am a true friend of France."

...

Tzara's head is wreathed in smoke, the white haze of brushwood smoke. Only here and there does a streak of black poke up in the bushy head of hair. His smile, however, is unchanged.
"Another ten years," he says sarcastically and reproachfully of a time that dares to fly past even Dadaists and Surrealists with such vulgar realism, "Nearly ten years!"
Since we last saw one another, that is.
There has been little change in comparison to our very first encounter. When could that have been anyway? In '24 - no, '23! Since then there had been occasions when he had received me in a six - room suite, in a villa built to his own plans and taste, amidst a museum - like collection of African sculpture. Now he is again welcoming me in a bare - walled hotel room, unshod and in pyjamas, having got out of bed to open the door, just as at our first meeting. Now he appears most satisfied. Formerly he must have drawn his unfailing liveliness from being able to feel constantly out in front. Even in that audacious, raucously honking gaggle of wild geese that was the avant - garde of French intellectual life, even there, for years on end, he was at the very fore in striking out vigorously against the wind. He is still up in front, heading the vic. But now there are other storms to contend with. The old movement, the literary one, has converged finally and definitively with the social movement, that of the working class, with which it had always aligned itself. Many, to be sure, had been left behind.
"Breton?" I ask.
At one time, during the Surrealist phase, he had been the lead bird.
"He broke away eventually. He was an advocate of free emotions, redemptive passions and love. He tried to raise it to a general principle. Even as a solution to social issues."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that women should govern, instinctively."
"And Eluard?"
"In the Resistance they would recite his poems during meetings. He struck the right note all at once. You remember Nusch, his second wife? She died just recently, quite suddenly, in less than a week. I have never seen anyone so overwhelmed and yet so uplifted by pain."
There is no need for me to ask about Aragon as I know all about the path he has taken. I simply enquire how he is.
"Funny, but only a few days ago he himself was asking after you; he heard you were coming. I even promised him..."
He is already reaching for the telephone, and whilst waiting for the call to be answered, comments, "He's become a national poet now, a veritable Victor Hugo. Hello! I was just talking about you!... That you will end up becoming a veritable Victor Hugo... Guess who I am going to hand you over to straight away?"
"And the new direction in literature?" I ask when I finish the telephone conversation.
"Yes indeed, literature! Your lot have committed a fundamental error there. Your Writers' Union, I mean. That appeal in which the writers' organisations of the world were called upon to protest over the matter of the Hungarians of Slovakia."
"You don't say."
"I have just come from Prague. I stopped off there on the way back from Budapest. It made a very bad impression there."
"We, for our part, had a few bad impressions too."
"But it was a faux pas, tactically speaking! No notice has been taken of the manifesto in the places from which you hope to gain a response; and where it was noticed it has only harmed you."
"I don't recollect whether I am conversant with the text of that manifesto;
I was no longer at home by then. But I can defend it even without seeing it. I'll sign it even without reading. Obviously, like the Hungarian nation as a whole, it appealed to humanity on the issue. It was defending Western democracy itself in the eyes of our own people. In the final analysis, we are defending the future of our neighbours as well; they too have staked their future on humanity. Anyway, literature cannot recognise tactical considerations in such cases."
"Mais, mon cher!"
"Mais oui!"
We plunge up to our necks in politics, the politics of the day, for a good three quarters of an hour. For the first time in our lives we are in opposite camps, agitated and impatient. Impatient precisely because we are both seeking the same thing, striving to make the same point, and maybe making no headway for precisely that reason, because in our hurry we collide, like two men who are both trying to push through a door ahead of one another. We finally make it. The point we get round to is that in this border dispute, which can easily turn nasty, it is necessary, first of all, that people on both sides who can see beyond borders, indeed rise above them, people of reason, need to talk over the fence, but only if from the outset they have the intention of understanding one another. Yet how are they going to clear up the mass of misunderstandings before that? Where are their passions to be set aside? Only in some neutral, objective forum. Here in the paternal court of conscience. Such a reconciliation, that setting of Europe to rights, might be a splendid task for French literature. But for that, of course, it would be helpful if - in this specific case, for example - it were to be cognisant of both parties. If we Hungarians were to be recognised at last.
We part smiling, but I trudge sadly down the stairs. This man has known me since I was a lad. I have been able to enjoy the tokens of his confidence, indeed friendship, for a quarter of a century. I am quite sure he does not doubt a single word that I say, a single assertion that I make, a single fact that I offer, nor the statistics and historical facts either. But even in the best of cases, he believes only me personally, admits only that I am right, not the nation to which I belong. Even he is incapable of identifying me with being Hungarian. Over against that he, too, is prejudiced in favour of another people, and not just because he is obviously still tied to it by more personal sympathies. He is seeking the truth, but what scrubland and Sahara of unknown lands he needs to traverse in order to get there. I can gauge by him what a monstrous wall we must break through in order to reach out even to those of good will; what remoteness and rejection we live in; to what depths we have been brushed from the place where we stood in the West's consciousness a hundred years ago, at the time of the '48 revolution. Though even then it was not as high as we imagine.

...

Lyrical poet

Aragon, through his activity, did not fit into activist literature. Others were satis fied, after a fashion, by dreams, experiments, repeated promises of world destruction. For him genuine action was necessary; his nature demanded it. There were three motors at work in him, each moving in a divergent direction. He was to be found amongst the Surrealists, but with one foot already in the realist novel. One foot was with Clarté, the other in the labour movement. He was like Shiva. All along he also took in the Middle Ages and was the first to arrive at a new national trajectory for the French lyrical poem. Yet lovers too quote his poems, those that he penned in between composing two illegal leaflets. Now all his limbs are propelling him in the same direction. It is about him that writers speak most amongst themselves - with the most wonderment and the most irritation. "When does he work?" they ask. For he is both everywhere in person, and meanwhile his rapidly proliferating books are also everywhere.
He heads the Comité National des Écrivains, the French writers' union. He directs the biggest left - wing publishing house, the Bibliothčque Française. The last time we met, in '38, was in the commotion of the Ce Soir editorial office; now we meet in the commotion of the publisher's. Everyone is rushing about. One has the feeling that the very presses turn on the driving - belt of his desire for haste.
The secret engines throb within a lithe and fragile body. Externally, this bonnet displays fastidious elegance, a glaze of the most impeccable French courtesy. We sit down, exchange smiles. We are smiling that we are alive, have lived through it all. Instantly, the telephone starts ringing.
As he listens to the distant talking, he converses with me from a sparkling corner of his eye. He gropes around, searching his memories. I am amazed by his powers of recollection.
"We spoke last time," he declares with a smile, "about what Hungarian books we might publish. Now we have the opportunity... That anthology..."
The telephone rings again. I quickly invite him to Hungary. He is sorry but he will not have the time, because he has just received an invitation to India as well, and he could not fit that in either as yet. There is a huge amount to be done here; only now is it really necessary to show them, the waverers, what resistance is about. But he has already linked his trip to Moscow with a small detour to Yugoslavia, on which he had long ago given Tito - ŕ mon ami Tito, he says - his word. He might, perhaps, be able to touch down for a minute in Hungary, on the flight to Belgrade.
"At least you could have a bit of a rest."
"Assuming I crash and am buried there."
The telephone rings again. Another also starts to buzz. He picks up one receiver and places it to an ear; he nods and replies. Yet even as he speaks, briskly and copiously, he cannot refrain from picking up the other receiver, because obviously there is nothing to stop him listening in the meantime with the other ear. From his conspiratorial smile, I see that he is now giving his ear over to listening to the first. Then suddenly he starts speaking into the other receiver. It puts me in mind of those master jugglers who are able to keep five balls in the air at once whilst balancing on three chairs stacked one on top of the other. But even that is not enough. With one elbow he presses the button of an electric bell on his desk. A tall, stooping young man enters. He points to the latter with his chin that he may take away some document. A display of mime clarifies that the document still has to be signed. He presses the right - hand receiver to his ear with an adroit hunch of the shoulder, and in a twinkling the freed hand has already dashed off a signature. That is how a poet lives.

Translated by Tim Wilkinson